Title: And a Bottle of Rum
Rating: T, for future violence, language, and general naught-ay-ness.
Summary: The Doctor invites Sally Sparrow on a trip back in time to introduce her to her famous pirate ancestor. Unfortunately, troublesome people and the penchant for finding trouble anywhere in time is not a good match. A Doctor Who - Pirates of the Caribbean crossover.
Disclaimer: If I owned Doctor Who, there would have been a lot more Mickey Smith. If I owned PotC, there would have been a lot more of... well, everyone British and stuffy. Sadly, this is reality.
A/N: Working title. This is an idea that has been tossed in and out of my head for quite a little while now. Nearly ten pages of notes later, as well lots of research on the Golden Age of Piracy, and nearly annoying all my friends into not talking to me by repeatedly asking their opinion, it takes form! In my mind, this is set after a few years after At World's End, and in the fourth series of Doctor Who, after Astrid but before Donna. I hope the actual airing of the fourth series doesn't negate that for me! Like Pirates of the Caribbean itself, this is not meant to be a great literary (or cinematic) masterpiece, so forgive me in advance for any silliness. Please review, concrit (and ideas for a better title!) happily accepted!

xx

“Obrigado, senhora.”

“Nao ha de que,” Sally felt herself smile, rare and genuine, at the elderly man. “Boa noite, senhor.”

“Boa noite,” he answered, his smile stretching all the way up to the lines that creased his eyes before he turned and ambled out, white coffee carefully in hand.

Like every other evening preceding it, Mr. Batista was the final customer in what had been a steady trickle of patrons looking for a late day caffeine fix, and Sally busied herself in the pre-close routine: locking the front door, turning off the light in the outer section of the establishment, wiping away all the rim stains left on the counter.

“Sally.” She looked up to see Cristina, the owner’s daughter, speak to her in near perfect English. Cristina was a short pixie of a girl, quickly approaching her twenties with a mop of russet curls and freckles splayed across her nose; she was also the shop’s manager, and ran things as tightly as she could without instigating mutiny. “Count out the register and take out trash before you leave.”

“Sim,” Sally answered in Portuguese, with an expression that vaguely resembled a cat’s menacing smile.

Sally Sparrow had not always lived in Portugal, nor had she actively sought to become a barista, but if the last few years of her live were any indication, things did not always turn out they way she expected them to. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that the crippling boredom she felt when her work night ended was painfully real, too real, she may have insisted the entire thing was a dream. And, like any good dream, it would come to an end after she intended it to but before she really wanted it to, and she’d be back in her flat in Clapton with the cat gently butting its forehead against her shoulder in a cry for attention.

Kathy would still be around for her to annoy, she’d still be victim to the dulcet flirtations of the Tube attendant at Tottenham, and she would not even have had to think about how to best wrest a blue police box away from Weeping Angel statues. Larry—

Sally picked up a sugar packet and studied it extensively for a long moment. She might have told herself she had no desire to think about Larry, but she knew how much of a lie that was. Of course she wanted to think about Larry—the way his fringe always fell over his eyes when he was lost in thought, those stupid t-shirts he would wear with phrases she never understood, the fact that he never remembered whose toothbrush was whose, how much she wished he would come find her, holed up in a tiny corner of Portugal, and prove that she was the most important thing in the world to him. But she also knew what came next—admonishing herself for getting lost in girlish fantasies at her age, believing that the fairy tale ideal of love would win out no matter what, even in the face of obsession, of sickness, of the lack of ability to just… let go. The world didn’t work like that; it was the one philosophy she held onto tightly, a mantra she kept close to her breast. She did not presume it was her place to decide whether the world was fair or not; but she knew how things worked. Good things came to those who worked for them. She had walked out on a good thing at the first sign of trouble.

Did she blame Larry? No, never. He had tried his best to be understanding. It had taken less than seventy two hours for her place in his life to become etched in the same stone the Weeping Angels had eternally become, so in the face of fear, of possible death, of losing his sister, of maybe saving the planet, he had become attached, and she in turn. But… handing a man she didn’t know a packet of papers doesn’t fix everything, and she was young and foolish to think that it did. And that truth is what ruined them, in the end. Her obsession.

So, Sally Sparrow ran. She left England, and Larry, and her parents’ and Kathy’s eternal resting place, and the shop, and (this was the one hope she clung equally tight to) aliens altogether. She had played her part, knitting together events fuzzily strewn across time. She could retire undefeated, she could forget.

When the rubbish was removed from the back room and the surplus in the cash register put into the safe, Sally turned off all the lights and locked the door behind her, saying goodbye for yet another night to the barista lifestyle.

The walk home was not a long one, and even though the sun had long set and the nightlife was in full force, it was not an intimidating one, either. It was not even ten minutes before she reached the maisonette.

She lived alone; she was used to that. Her parents had been gone as long as she could remember, and she had grown up in a children’s home, before being tossed from foster house to foster house with all the buoyancy of a reluctant squash ball before finishing school at sixteen and getting a job at the Betsey Trotwood. From there, it had been job to job, anything she could find. A temp at Hemscott; working the front desk at a hotel; selling Oyster Cards in the Underground; even working a magazine stand at Heathrow when no other opportunity presented itself. Sally had made odd money taking pictures for local magazines and newspapers—that was the only thing that changed, due in large part to her limited Portuguese. She still took pictures—snapshots, this time, glimpses of the life she was not living, moments captured perfectly in time, buildings she’d never go into and people she’d never talk to. How could she not? Had Sally been feeling bold, she may have called herself an artist, and maybe there was a speck of art in what she captured; life and love and the concept of time—she concept that she herself had proved so very abstract and nothing like she had imagined. But none of it for profit, none of it for business—not yet, anyway.

Was she happy? Maybe. Sally considered happiness the way someone else might consider a gap in his or her mouth where a tooth used to be; explorative, slightly disbelieving. What she was, was organised, even if the clutter of books and negatives and positives and all eighteen of her DVDs (she had, on a whim, purchased A Clockwork Orange some months ago and was relieved to find it held no Easter Eggs of a bespectacled man) strewn across her flat told otherwise. She had her routine, she had her regular customers at work, she had co-workers she like, and co-workers she liked less. She had contentment, a certain satisfaction that even if it wasn’t exciting or blissful, it was a life free of obsession and the constant waiting, wondering when a wayward traveler was going to be barreled through time, and would she need to do anything else?

It was enough.

Sally Sparrow did not expect the next day to be any different. She didn’t have many expectations in her day; normality was one of the few she did.

And then she saw the Doctor.

xx

Obrigado, senhora. - Thank you, miss
Nao ha de que. - You're welcome.
Boa noite, senhor. - Good night, sir.